Oral impressions are an important information storage source in the clinical dental clinics and repair processes. Almost every patient needs to obtain one or more impressions. By comparing multiple impressions obtained prior to, during, and after treatment, doctors can understand the effect of the treatment, thereby improving the accuracy of the examination, diagnosis and treatment. Dental technicians also need to determine the shape of dentures according to the impressions.
At present, easy operation, high precision, convenient storage digital impression technology is gaining more and more dental medical expert's attention. More and more efforts and funds are put into the research of this technology. Digital impressions may be taken in two manners according to the position of the scan, i.e. extra-oral scan and intra-oral scan. The intra-oral scan is a new scan manner emerging in recent years. In the intra-oral scan, a probe is inserted into the patient's oral cavity to directly measure the teeth to obtain a digital impression in real-time. In comparison with the extra-oral scan, the intra-oral scan has many advantages. Firstly, it improves patient satisfaction. Secondly, to the doctor, the intra-oral scan further improves the quality of the impression, reduces the number of operation steps and operation time, greatly reduces the material consumption and labour force, and provides effective guidance for doctor's operation. Finally and most importantly, it also establishes a communication platform between the patient and doctor, which allows the doctor and patient to discuss the obtained digital impressions. This not only allows the patient to understand his/her disease conditions and the intent of the doctor, but also allows the doctor to better formulate or correct a treatment program based on the needs of the patient, thus making the doctor-patient relationship more harmonious.
Due to the particularity of the real-time intra-oral scan, in addition to the requirement of a compact probe (can be inserted into the oral cavity), it is also required that the scan be as fast as possible. Therefore, it is desired to provide an intra-oral scan technology which can perform a scan directly in the human oral cavity and obtain the scan result in real-time.